Julius Rufinianus’s short treatise on rhetorical figures of thought and speech (which is in fact dedicated only to the former) is included in Halm’s edition of the Rhetores Latini Minores (pp. 38-47). The text is divided into 38 paragraphs, and for the author’s own declaration seeks to begin where Aquila Romanus concluded his work on the same theme. As in Aquila Romanus and Halm’s other authors who wrote works De figuris (Rutilius Lupus, the anonymous authors of the Carmen de figuris and the Schemata dianoeas), the figures are introduced by a Greek term (in two cases written in Latin letters), then explained with a Latin definition and illustrated by way of examples drawn primarily from Cicero and Vergil, secondarily from Cato and Caesar, and from occasionally Plautus, Terence, Caecilius, Ennius, Lucilius, and Horace. Attempts to identify either a precise order or a well-defined structure within the work have not met with success, and the distinctions made between figures of thought and speech that one finds clearly delineated in Aquila Romanus are not present in Rufinianus’s De figuris: one finds a few figures from Quintilian, but not in the order they are given at Inst. 9.2.6-64. Rufinianus’s work presumes to complete the work of Aquila Romanus, which in turn is professed to rely on that of Alexander Numenius, a Greek rhetorician of the 2nd c. and author of a treatise On figures of thought and speech.

Halm’s edition of Rufinianus’s text was not based on manuscripts, but on the editio princeps, a text assembled by Beatus Rhenanus and published by Froben’s press at Basel in 1521. This relied on the so-called Codex Spirensis, a manuscript that is now lost but which Halm considered to be of high quality (Veterum aliquot in arte Rhetorica traditiones, de tropis in primis & schematis verborum & sententiarum non aspernanda me hercle opuscula, nunc primum in lucem aedita, cum quibusdam alijs, quorum ordo sequenti pagella describitur). In his 1993 study of the pseudo-Rufinianan treatise De schematis lexeos, Ulrich Schindel confirmed the authenticity of a few excerpts of the De figuris contained in ms. Roma, Bibl. Casanatense 1086 (9th c.), a codex preserving various grammatical and rhetorical texts. In fact, he deemed this a superior text to that of the published edition and asserted that it would allow a typology of errors to be constructed that might also prove useful for improving or correcting the authentic works of Rufinianus. [A. Balbo; tr. C. L. Caterine].